Shepherd’s Office (SO) is a collaborative performance project between artists Daniela Vainio (Venky Shepherd) and Zaneta Zukalova (Jeffrey Shepherd), questioning the systematic order of Amazon Mechanical Turk.
The Amazon Mechanical Turk, inspired by Jeffrey Bezos’ idea and coined in 2001 by Vonky Harinarayan, is a crowdsourcing online platform, where employers (Requesters) register their HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) to be completed by Workers, for pay. HITs are simple assignments which computers cannot complete at the moment, or which are more effectively completed by human rather than machine labor, such as identifying information, predominantly in text format, seen in an image. For many businesses, NGOs and academics, the HITs system is an easy, fast and inexpensive way of conducting surveys, experiments, and collecting other data from a global pool of workers.
Most of the tasks are simple and short, yet poorly paid; the reward for most of them is under 10 cents. The average Workers’ income is $3.13/h, although 51% (sample of US workers) have a college degree. The workers, according to research, show important differences from the general population. They are less religious, more educated, yet less likely to be employed than the general population. Despite being advertised as a diverse pool (190 countries), the majority of its 600k workers, over 75%, live in the United States and India.
At the Art Fair Suomi, Helsinki, SO draws on its debut at Tate Modern. Here, in addition to giving the Workers the right to dictate tasks to SO, thereby reversing the power dynamics within the employer – employee relationship, SO investigates the Workers’ side in more detail while advocating for improvement of their rights and experiences within the platform.
Research paper for Media-N: link